• BreakDecks
    link
    fedilink
    English
    13 months ago

    Important to note that this only applies to future releases by the legal copyright owner. If the community doesn’t like it (and they often don’t), someone else can fork it from the last time it was GPL, and contributors can abandon the original codebase in favor of the GPL fork. As a result, it is extremely unwise to try to de-GPL software with a lot of contributors, as the copyright holder doesn’t have a great chance at competing with a fork if contributors jump ship.

    Linus Torvalds could legally pivot Linux to a proprietary license if he wanted to, but we’d probably see it replaced with a fork called “Binix” or something within a few months, and he’d be in charge of abandonware at that point.

    • Possibly linux
      link
      fedilink
      English
      13 months ago

      Agreed although Linux would be really hard to relicense. You would need to get approval from every single person who every contributed